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Last Updated on Monday, 07 January 2013 15:16

Over the Christmas holidays in 2010, the DPC compiled a list of 12 websites with a festive theme that represent different types of online content. The list was published in January 2011 as a benchmark to show through time, how different types of digital content degrades and to highlight the challenges faced by services that preserve web-based content. No claim is made about the historical importance of these pages - the test is simply illustrative of a year in the life of the Internet.

In January 2013, only 8 of the 12 links are still functioning as originally designed. Of the 4 problem pages, two have disappeared completely, one is available through a web archive and one has trouble rendering in recent browsers.

The so-called 'Twelve Tweets of Christmas' includes pages with obscure filetypes or content that one would assume break rules of long term preservation - including a site with embedded flash, a non-standard PDF file and a series of blogging and social media sites where content changes rapidly. But the evidence from the 'Twelve Tweets of Christmas in 2013' points in an unexpected direction. The pages that are missing include 2 relatively standard HTML documents and an HTML document render from a content management system in php. One of the broken links comes from a news publisher.

The Naughty List in 2013 includes

a page from the US air defence station NORAD describing the history of their festive 'Santa-tracking' service (available through the Internet Archive)

an article from The Guardian online describing the most popular toys in 2010

the programme for the Hogmanay Party in George Square in Glasgow for 31st December 2010

a blog reviewing the Dr Who Christmas Special from 2010

Of these, only the NORAD site is accessible through a web archive. The Guardian Article has disappeared entirely and reports an error, the programme for the Hogmanay Party redirects to a new page with none of the original content, and the blog has rendering problems in the popular modern browsers IE8 and Firefox 17 A fifth page - a text file containing data from the Braemar Weather Station - has been updated since the last check.

The full list including a description of why they were chosen is given below.

A sample script for a performance of Sinbad the Sailor as a pantomime written by JS Beeteson in 2002 (A self extracting zip file containing a PDF version 1.2, originally created from Word using PDFfactory Pro: http://www.e-pantos.co.uk/sbd_sample_n6.exe - warning this is an executable file.)

The listing for the Hogmanay Party in George Square in Glasgow. (A non-conformant XHTML1.0 page with non-conformant syle sheets: http://glasgowloveschristmas.com/?page=hogmanay-acts) - page redirects to a generic home page with current information but without showing the original content which seems to be lost.